The Lodge is the perfect winter horror movie

Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz’s 2019 horror movie The Lodge has stuck with me for its suffocating atmosphere, the brutal isolation of its location, and a snowbound setting that keeps the outside world at bay while slowly driving its occupants mad with cabin fever. But what lingers most isn’t just the cold location: It’s how the movie explores the ways hatred can spiral into something worse. The filmmakers let the characters’ traumas fester unchecked, trapping them in a situation where the emotions are as cold as the world outside the titular location.

Riley Keough stars as Grace, a vulnerable woman left to supervise her fiancé’s children, Aidan (Jaeden Martell) and Mia (Lia McHugh), during a secluded holiday retreat. When their father, Richard (Richard Armitage), is abruptly called away for work, a vicious snowstorm traps Grace and the kids inside a remote winter cabin, cutting them off from the rest of the world.

The film’s opening makes its thesis painfully clear: Isolation and antagonism are a lethal combo. Richard informs his long-estranged wife, Laura (Alicia Silverstone), that he plans to finalize their divorce and marry his much younger girlfriend, Grace. Laura’s resentment over Richard and Grace is already etched into her children, even before Laura pours herself a glass of wine and shoots herself dead in the living room. Richard didn’t need to tell Laura about his new marriage in the same breath he ended theirs. He could have given her grace (pun very much intended). He didn’t, and that failure detonates into violence. It’s a cruelty that the children internalize and turn on Grace during their trip.

The snowbound lodge represents physical isolation, but emotional isolation is already spreading through the entire family. Richard is emotionally retreating from Laura’s suicide and using Grace as a rebound without truly understanding her. The children are reeling from their mother’s death and the emotional distance it has put between them and their father, who leaves them in a remote lodge with a woman they barely know and have been conditioned to despise. Grace, the most isolated of all, desperately wants the approval of two kids who will never give it to her, while her partner remains willfully ignorant of her deeply troubled past.

As the film reveals, Grace was raised in a cult, and at age 12, she was the sole survivor of a mass suicide orchestrated by her father, the sect’s leader. Richard is a journalist, and Grace was his research subject before they became partners. The children blame her — “the psychopath,” as they call her — for their mother’s death. When Richard leaves the cabin, Grace’s belongings, including her clothes, psychiatric meds, and even her dog, vanish, along with all the food and Christmas decorations. The generator dies, draining their phones of power and severing their last connection to the outside world. Eventually, the children convince Grace that they’re trapped in purgatory. Once that idea takes hold, there’s no coming back for any of them.

Though Grace and the children are sharing the same space, each of them is completely alone. They’re all drowning in grief, yet no one is willing or able to extend the kindness they so desperately need from one another. Add cabin fever to that emotional isolation, and the film becomes a slow-burning collapse, where bad choices pile up, and the consequences feel both cruel and satisfyingly cathartic.

It’s a brutal lesson in the costs of constant antagonism and refusing to recognize that everyone is fighting their own private, internal wars. The Lodge shows how isolation blinds people to what’s right in front of them, like wandering into a blizzard at night. It doesn’t just destroy individuals: It corrodes everyone in its orbit. Isolation can make people selfish, warp their behavior, or drag them back into the darkest corners of their past. In moments like that, it’s better to put oneself in others’ shoes than to respond with cold cruelty or icy indifference. But no one in The Lodge does that, and that’s what makes this movie so memorable — everyone gets exactly what they deserve.

Everyone’s internal struggles get the best of them, which causes Aidan, Mia, Richard, and even Grace to make brutal, selfish choices with no consideration for what anyone else may be going through. And the inevitable consequences of those choices are extrapolated to gloriously bad results for all parties involved. The Lodge is a clever psychological horror that pushes cabin fever to its scariest extremes. But it also carries a brilliant message: living without empathy and emotional generosity is its own form of horror.

The Lodge is available to stream for free on Tubi.